Paper short abstract:

How is the French GDP calculated? Following the example of non-financial corporations GDP, we seek to write a non-formalist account of this formalism, and to understand how such a figure can involve a certain kind of economic representation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws attention to the practical ways of building comprehensive economic representations. More precisely, it examines the building process of the French Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a measure of the economic activity level for the entire country. Drawing on STS approaches and the sociology of quantification, we try to understand the ways in which heterogeneous numbers meet, circulate and are gathered in a single figure that embody the economy as a whole. Our analysis is based on an ethnographic study at INSEE (the French statistical institute) - within the National Accounts Department - and mixes interviews, observations and technical documents, all related to the construction of GDP. In this paper we focus on a small part of the building process: the non-financial corporations GDP. We seek to qualify the "passage aux comptes" (accounts shift), an operation where the corporation statistics are translated into the national accounts concepts. For this, we examine the mundane and practical ways in which national accountants question, discuss, and follow the numbers, to obtain a non-financial corporations GDP. Taking quantification as a social practice, we intend to write a non-formalist account of a formal category such as "economic activity". Hence, GDP in practice is far less a "merely technical number" than a problematic and negotiated achievement. Moreover, it is an occasion to describe the qualities of this particular indicator, and how it affects the way we think about the economy and we act upon it.